Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  When the neighbors learn the reason we never seem to be at school, we pack up yet again . . . leaving behind our clothes, blankets, towels, socks, and any ounce of self-respect that wasn’t compromised by lice and liver. I wonder how any landlord will ever house us again if word gets out how we left the place. As their 1978 New Year’s resolution, Cherie and Camille have decided to make a change. “We want to move out,” Camille informs Cookie. “Out where?” “Out of the car !” Cherie tempers the conversation by adding, “I would like to go back to school.” I would like to go back to school, too, I’m seething to say, but I don’t dare utter a sentence that could leave me without allies. By late January they’re both living at Kathy’s and it’s clear I’ll probably miss the sixth grade altogether on account of the fact that we’d need an address to register for school. While Cookie spends her afternoons in bars, Norman, Rosie, and I take short walks in the snow or stay huddled together in the car with garbage bags of belongings piled on top of us and layers of socks covering all our limbs for warmth. Sometimes the bar owners invite us inside to sit in a booth as long as we don’t run around; other times they let us split a hamburger if we wash dishes and mop the floors. One of them tells me, “You’re a good big sister, you know.” At first I’m confused when she slips me a five-dollar bill and puts her finger to her lips . . . then I get her point: If I don’t protect the money meant for the kids and me, Cookie will spend it on herself. “I like to work,” I tell the owner, delighted by her praise. It’s true—it keeps us warm and occupied, and we get to eat for free. There’s also something in it for us when Cookie meets a guy at the bar: Either we get to sleep in his living room (taking savvy advantage of the chance to squeeze toothpaste onto our fingers for a long-awaited brushing) or we get the whole car to ourselves while our mother spends the night in a hotel. Around town Cookie hears there’s a deli in Commack with an open cashier position. She agrees to take the job for less money than usual, since her new boss is giving her a perk by allowing us to move into the apartment upstairs, and for me the perk is that Cherie and Camille have agreed to move back in with us now that we live in a normal place again. In February we all go to visit a school in Hauppauge . . . but since we don’t have records for the first half of the year, we’re not able to register. “We’ll climb on the bus every day anyway,” I tell Norman and Rosie, and the plan quickly proves successful.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Jewish virgin in the brothel is a direct parallel of the girls of early Christian fi ction. But by the time the Talmud was redacted, Christian authors were embarking on even more daring reconfi gurations of these ancient conventions. F RO M S H A M E TO S I N : TH E P E N ITE NT P RO S TIT U TE S Th e famous actress whose stunning conversion is memorialized in an im-promptu aside of John Chrysostom was not the only woman of her time to seek a repentance that was destined to reverberate in the collective imagination of Christians. Sometime around AD 400, far from the glamours of the Antiochene stage, another woman, Taïsia, made a spiritual turn that was just as stark, if less immediately celebrated. Her story is related with brief but brutal realism in one of the most primitive documents of monastic wisdom, Th e Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Orphaned in her youth, Taïsia turned her home into a guest house along the fringes of the settled world, in the pioneer country of Egyptian monasticism, at the desert outpost of Scetis. Known for her generosity with the brothers, her stores were gradually exhausted, and in desperate seasons she did what many ancient women, faced by the mundane brutalities of a subsistence order, might have done. She profi ted with her body. Th e Sayings add no drama, subtract no shame from this bare fact: “She was led to prostitution.” But the mere act of narrating a woman’s passage from respectable poverty to sexual humiliation was an epochal novelty. In nearly a thousand years of the written word, there is little to match the simple authenticity of this humble lapse. More dramatic still, Taïsia was to fi nd an escape from prostitution, no less miraculous than the “devices of virtue” that saved the heroines of romance. But unlike the imaginary girls of romance, Taïsia’s body was not spared that “one single abuse” whose avoidance was the deepest convention of romance. In the small world of frontier monasticism, rumors of the girl’s plight quickly spread. Th e brothers were distraught by her fall. Th ey appointed the sturdiest among them, a monk known as John the Dwarf, to go to her and “set her aff airs in order.” His mission met resentment as soon as he reached the door, whose guardian chided him. “From the beginning you have devoured her stores, and now she is destitute.” Nevertheless, Taïsia grants John entry, reasoning to herself, “Th ose monks are always roving about the R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D 

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Because the heroine’s identity partakes in the mysterious essence of her freedom, to lose that freedom would be a sort of death. The romantic heroine must be, volubly, willing to die. Callirhoe would expressly rather be dead than be a slave. Anthia tells the slave about to sell her, “Just kill me yourself.” Slavery, and with it presumptive sexual shame, is a sort of social death. For the heroine to lose her physical purity would be, in effect, to cease to exist. The sentiment receives arch expression in The Ethiopian Tale. The heroine, Charicleia, reflects on her willingness to commit suicide rather than experience defloration. “If it is a death achieved without violation, sweet will be my end … chastity is a glorious winding sheet.” The line between honor and shame, freedom and slavery, chastity and violation, was considered a threshold between life and death. This conception fuels one of the more stunning tropes of the romance, the apparent death and resurrection of the heroine. Clitophon repeatedly believes that Leucippe has suffered a gruesome death, but each time she is “reborn,” in that she reappears in the story unharmed—alive and virginal.12 Characterization in the romance is based on sharply drawn types. In the social logic that assigns meaning to each role, slavery is encoded as the opposite of the heroine. The logic is often exposed in highly contrived judicial dramas, which are a stock element of the genre. The civil law in the Greek romance is like the backdrop of the urbanized Mediterranean: recognizable, slightly irreal, and bent to suit the author’s purposes as needed. The law is an expression of a sort of universal social grammar. A character in Chariton’s romance, for instance, defended himself against charges of adultery by alleging that Callirhoe was a slave: “The law of adultery does not protect slaves.” The trial scene in Leucippe and Clitophon is an elaborately rendered judicial set piece. The law, especially as it bears on sexual rights and prohibitions, is a cipher for the social system. In the trial of Melite for adultery, the prosecutor outlines the thoroughly social matrix of the rules governing sexual contact. “If her husband was dead, the guilt would be removed, for there is no one to suffer the injury of adultery. A marriage lacking a husband cannot be outraged. But if the husband lives, the marriage has not been abolished, and he who has so thoroughly violated the lawfully wedded wife of another man has become an outlaw.”13

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  At one point, I remembered something I had completely forgotten until that moment. When I was a boy, my mother took me to church. When I was about ten years old, I was outside of our church with my friends, one of whom had brought a visiting relative to the service. The visiting child was a shy, skinny boy about my height who was clinging to his cousin nervously. He didn’t say anything as the group of us chatted away. I asked him where he was from, and when this child tried to speak he stumbled horribly. He had a severe speech impediment and couldn’t get his mouth to cooperate. He couldn’t even say the name of the town where he lived. I had never seen someone stutter like that; I thought he must have been joking or playing around, so I laughed. My friend looked at me worriedly, but I didn’t stop laughing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother looking at me with an expression I’d never seen before. It was a mix of horror, anger, and shame, all focused on me. It stopped my laughing instantly. I’d always felt adored by my mom, so I was unnerved when she called me over. When I got to her, she was very angry with me. “What are you doing?” “What? I didn’t do…” “Don’t you ever laugh at someone because they can’t get their words out right. Don’t you ever do that!” “I’m sorry.” I was devastated to be reprimanded by my mom so harshly. “Mom, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.” “You should know better, Bryan.” “I’m sorry. I thought…” “I don’t want to hear it, Bryan. There is no excuse, and I’m very disappointed in you. Now, I want you to go back over there and tell that little boy that you’re sorry.” “Yes, ma’am.” “Then I want you to give that little boy a hug.” “Huh?” “Then I want you to tell him that you love him.” I looked up at her and, to my horror, saw that she was dead serious. I had reacted as apologetically as I possibly could, but this was way too much. “Mom, I can’t go over and tell that boy I love him. People will—” She gave me that look again. I somberly turned around and returned to my group of friends. They had obviously seen my mother’s scolding; I could tell because they were all staring at me. I went up to the little boy who had struggled to speak. “Look, man, I’m sorry.” I was genuinely apologetic for laughing and even more deeply regretful of the situation I had put myself in.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The result was an inevitable slide toward patriarchy. Women were flatly prohibited from seeking divorce, and so long as their first husband was still living, they were forbidden to remarry, on pain of accusation of adultery. John Chrysostom, in the very same set of sermons that showed him sympathetic to the humble sufferings of women, could unleash a rhetoric against women that grates the modern ear. “They are like runaway slaves, who flee the master’s house but drag their chains along. Women who leave their husbands carry around the condemnation of the law like a chain, and are accused of adultery.… For she whose husband is alive becomes an adulteress.” In a society where a woman’s sexual honor was the measure of her worth, those were words calculated to bruise. John knew that Christian rules ran against common practice. “It may happen that slaves change their masters, even if the master is living, but the wife can never change husbands so long as he is living. It is adultery. Don’t read me the laws which have been laid down for those outside, which command that a notice of divorce be rendered and then set you free. You will not be judged by those laws on the day God has appointed, but by the law he has established.” Men, too, were deprived of access to divorce, with one all-important exception: female infidelity. In late antiquity the exception clauses uttered by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew were taken to mean that a husband could dismiss an unfaithful wife. Even John would accept it, with a little tergiversation. “An adulteress is not really even a wife.” The most he could find to say for such a rule was that it prevented bloodshed in the house. But what emerges so clearly from his sermons is the way that the church forcefully sought to alleviate the sexual double standard while importing a new double standard in the rules of divorce. 45

• From Untrue (2018)

  But lately and more often than she can possibly keep track of, Jenkins—who wears her medium-length dark hair in a smooth, well-kempt longish bob, sports round, owlish glasses, and is often photographed in conservative jackets—is as likely to be called a whore, a slut, “a walking sexually transmitted infection,” “everything that is wrong with women,” “a selfish cunt,” and “a fucking cumdumpster” as she is to be addressed with the honorific “Professor.” These names were first hurled at her—in online comments, emails, anonymous letters to her department, and all the contemporary equivalents of degrading graffiti on the walls of a men’s room reeking of piss—after she wrote a blog piece for Slate, and even more intensely following the 2017 publication of her book What Love Is: And What It Could Be. Jenkins’s crossover work of nonfiction is an accessible philosophical treatise on love, including an exploration of the fact that love is often neither exclusionary nor exclusive. Jenkins was driven to write What Love Is in part because she wants philosophy to be something everyday and in the service of real people, applied to subjects that matter to them: who isn’t interested in love? When we spoke, she told me she is inspired by exemplars of politically engaged philosophy like Socrates (“He’d just walk around and try to get anyone who’d listen to talk with him about philosophical concepts!” she enthuses), Simone de Beauvoir (“She wrote The Second Sex for every woman. She just knew it mattered”), and her beloved Bertrand Russell (“He dared to write not just analytic philosophy but explorations of sex and love. And he really paid a price for it. A very high price”). Jenkins also wrote What Love Is for deeply personal reasons: she herself is in a polyamorous relationship with two men, her husband, with whom she’s been for “about nine years” as of this writing, and her boyfriend, whom she met in 2012. She wanted to engage with the theoretical and lived implications of her own arrangement, one she knew to be gaining popularity, and explore and critique our deep and often unspoken but profoundly powerful cultural expectations around monogamy. “If the history of popular culture in the last half century is anything to go by, questions about the nature of romantic love are very important” is how she sums up the why of her book in its introduction, alluding to sex scandals (from Clinton to Mitterrand), popular song lyrics (“I Want to Know What Love Is,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?”), and shows like The Affair. Of her own life, she writes:

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: The just sin not easily out of contempt; but sometimes they fall into a sin through ignorance or weakness from which they easily arise. If, however, they go so far as to sin out of contempt, they become most wicked and incorrigible, according to the word of Jer. 2:20: “Thou hast broken My yoke, thou hast burst My bands, and thou hast said: ‘I will not serve.’ For on every high hill and under every green tree thou didst prostitute thyself.” Hence Augustine says (Ep. lxxviii ad Pleb. Hippon.): “From the time I began to serve God, even as I scarcely found better men than those who made progress in monasteries, so have I not found worse than those who in the monastery have fallen.” OF THOSE THINGS THAT ARE COMPETENT TO RELIGIOUS (SIX ARTICLES)We must now consider the things that are competent to religious; and under this head there are six points of inquiry: (1) Whether it is lawful for them to teach, preach, and do like things? (2) Whether it is lawful for them to meddle in secular business? (3) Whether they are bound to manual labor? (4) Whether it is lawful for them to live on alms? (5) Whether it is lawful for them to quest? (6) Whether it is lawful for them to wear coarser clothes than other persons? Whether it is lawful for religious to teach, preach, and the like?Objection 1: It would seem unlawful for religious to teach, preach, and the like. For it is said (VII, qu. i, can. Hoc nequaquam) in an ordinance of a synod of Constantinople [*Pseudosynod held by Photius in the year 879]: “The monastic life is one of subjection and discipleship, not of teaching, authority, or pastoral care.” And Jerome says (ad Ripar. et Desider. [*Contra Vigilant. xvi]): “A monk’s duty is not to teach but to lament.” Again Pope Leo [*Leo I, Ep. cxx ad Theodoret., 6, cf. XVI, qu. i, can. Adjicimus]: says “Let none dare to preach save the priests of the Lord, be he monk or layman, and no matter what knowledge he may boast of having.” Now it is not lawful to exceed the bounds of one’s office or transgress the ordinance of the Church. Therefore seemingly it is unlawful for religious to teach, preach, and the like.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  IN THE COLORFUL treasury of monastic tales known as The Spiritual Meadow, written down sometime around AD 600, we meet two brothers following the ascetic life who have sworn never to be separated from each other. One of them sensed himself falling victim to the lures of the flesh and asked his partner to release him from their oath of spiritual camaraderie. “I am being dragged into fornication, and I want to return to the world.” His brother would not release him from their bond but instead accompanied him “into the city,” standing right outside the door of the “den of fornication.” After his assignation, the fallen brother refused to return to the desert; “I will remain in the world.” Still his faithful companion refused to depart from him, and so they continued living in the city, Jerusalem, earning wages as day laborers, the one brother living in complete abandonment, the other in continual penance for his brother’s sins. Eventually the sinner was brought to repent of his transgressions and asked his holy brother, in contrition, to take him back “into the wilderness, so that I may be saved.” They took up residence in a cave, where they would live out their days in fulfillment of their oath. In this moralizing vignette we see, through the eyes of monks, the lines between sexual sin and bodily restraint laid out across the landscape. The “world,” the “city,” was virtually synonymous with the submission to the flesh. The wilderness, in its barren, craggy recesses, was a retreat from the corruption of the civilized order. In the stark figures of monastic imagination, the world remained, as ever, in the grip of demonic eros.1

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  mechanics of sexual regulation, but only within the terms established by the public authorities, whose criminalization of adultery was the foundation of an ancient po liti cal economy of sex. In Gregory’s world, those authorities have lost a little of their precarious hold on the circulation of sexual honor. Th e expansion of private force at the expense of public power was gradational, but no less dramatic for that fact. Already in the reign of Th eoderic in Italy, generally one of the most traditional of the successor kingdoms, we fi nd the king excusing justifi able hom i cide in the case of adultery on the grounds that it was simply a law of nature for men to defend their wives with the same violence that “bulls,” “rams,” and “stallions” controlled their mates, whereas the failure to do so would “redound to a man’s eternal shame”! Here, in early sixth- century Italy, was a society that still possessed a relatively strong apparatus of public law. A generation later, during the regency of Th eoderic’s grandson, an edict was issued in the name of defending ci-vilitas, civility. It compasses a number of sexual regulations. A man convicted of adultery was deprived of all rights of legitimate marriage himself; if rich, he lost half his property, and if poor, he was exiled. No man was to be joined to two wives at the same time, which was lust or cupidity, and in either case was to cost a man all of his property. If a man dishonored his marriage by being joined to a concubine, the woman was punished. A freeborn concubine was to be yoked to the slavery of the man’s wife; a slave who engaged in such disgrace was subjected to a penalty of the mistress’s choos-ing, “excepting the penalty of blood.” What is notable about this promulga-tion is not the headlong intrusion of moralism into lawgiving, but the subtle disappearance of old modes of regulation, in which status above all framed the dynamics of power between state and society. A century later, in the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, the mix of Christian moralizing and public pronouncement had continue to progress. Men who “lie with men” were to be castrated and placed under ecclesiastical supervision. For the fi rst time we hear that a woman who “plays the role of a prostitute” was condemned to three hundred lashes and exiled from her city; so serious was the lawmaker that judges who were negligent in the enforcement of these mea sures were themselves to receive one hundred lashes and a fi ne of thirty gold coins. In the Byzantine world, older frameworks or ga nized around status maintained their strength even in the Justinianic dispensation, and only in the Ecloga of the eighth century do we fi nd a total breakdown of the old order. C O N C L U S I O N  Gone is the ancient rubric of the lex Iulia. All extramarital sex is punished.

• From Untrue (2018)

  For starters, men needed their jobs in manufacturing and industry back. And so women would have to give them up. Society mobilized to get them to do just that—through shame, guilt, and a propaganda program about the social importance of stay-at-home wives and mothers. As historians have pointed out, the rise of 1950s suburban living in the US, with its dearly held belief that a woman’s place was in the home and that to be female was to be fulfilled by the calling of intensive care for one’s children, household, and mate was certainly aided and abetted by the GI Bill, television shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and even fashion (Christian Dior’s lavish, wasp-waisted, and stilettoed “New Look” made it aggressively clear that it wasn’t chic to dress for a factory line anymore). One government PSA from the period showed a female factory worker in court, imploring the judge for a light sentence for her son accused of vandalism. “The message to women was clear,” writes historian Melissa E. Murray. “There was no need to [stay] in the labor force. Instead, women were needed back at the hearth in their traditional role as mothers responsible for the careful rearing of productive citizens.” Good mothers didn’t work. They went to court to bail their kids out. They cooked and cleaned. Their work was the home. Bateman’s conclusions participated in cajoling women out of the workforce in an admittedly indirect but hardly subtle way. Insights about Drosophila melanogaster helped reassert plough-informed gender roles by giving scientific credence to the idea that females are by nature sexually exclusive nesters who find satisfaction not in the world of action, competition, and earning but in monogamous heterosexual mating and intensive investment in their offspring. Die, Rosie the Riveter.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I wasn’t the hot guy in class. I wasn’t even the cute guy in class. I was ugly. Puberty was not kind to me. My acne was so bad that people used to ask what was wrong with me, like I’d had an allergic reaction to something. It was the kind of acne that qualifies as a medical condition. Acne vulgaris, the doctor called it. We’re not talking about pimples, kids. We’re talking pustules—big, pus-filled blackheads and whiteheads. They started on my forehead, spread down the sides of my face, and covered my cheeks and neck and ravaged me everywhere. Being poor didn’t help. Not only could I not afford a decent haircut, leaving me with a huge, unruly Afro, but my mother also used to get angry at the fact that I grew out of my school uniforms too fast, so to save money she started buying my clothes three sizes too big. My blazer was too long and my pants were too baggy and my shoes flopped around. I was a clown.

• From Untrue (2018)

  During the summers, Dan worked while Annika traveled—and occasionally slept with other men she met. Again, she and Dan “never discussed it. I had a measure of independence even then.” She was unsure what Dan did while she was away, Annika said, “but I have to guess he was seeing other people too.” Or maybe not, as he didn’t seem to have much of a sex drive, a fact that Annika continued to push to the back of her mind. What kind of a woman cared about something like that? she wondered. Anyway, a few of Annika’s college girlfriends had similar non-arrangements—of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t talk” variety—with their boyfriends. So Annika didn’t feel so unusual, even as she wished Dan wanted her more and felt awkward and stressed about nearly getting caught and keeping secrets. They found an apartment together in the city after she graduated, and soon Dan began pushing for marriage. “Maybe it’s my Scandinavian background, but I was in no hurry,” Annika told me as she poured us each another cup of tea. “My parents had friends in very long-term, committed relationships, people with kids, who weren’t married.” Sex, specifically Dan wanting it less than Annika did, was also an issue. “It made me feel…rejected and undesirable. He said it was because he had low testosterone or because he was tired. For a while I was just occasionally having sex with guys I met through work or at a party. I would not have been sleeping with other guys if our sex life had been great, honestly. I felt like I deserved to have a sex life.” But “undisclosed non-monogamy” was emotionally costly. There were several close calls over the years, once when a man she’d had over left his jacket there and Dan, suspicious, asked whose it was. Her heart pounding, Annika made an excuse—it belonged to their friend—and made a note to herself: the risks of cheating just weren’t worth it. And yet it was exciting to be with other men, and their desire was a kind of salve against Dan’s sexual indifference. Like Alicia Walker’s interview subjects, Annika used undisclosed extra-pair sex as a “workaround” strategy in order to stay in a sexless relationship. When Dan proposed yet again, Annika thought it might somehow fix things, at least for him. “I figured, He’s American. This means a lot to him. Maybe getting married will make things better for us.” She said yes, and for a while it did. But after an initial literal honeymoon period of ardor, Dan was no more interested in sex than he had been before marriage. And Annika began sleeping with other men again. It made her feel twinges of guilt, sure, but it was also thrilling and made her feel wanted and alive.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  There was an old mattress on the floor and he got himself onto it and began to take his shirt off, watching the girl as she took off all her clothing. She lay down in the bed next to him and asked him why he wasn’t taking off his pants. “I can’t.” He hesitated. It was very hard for him to talk about. “I can’t take them off,” he said. He pointed to his legs. “They were paralyzed in the war.” She looked at him and seemed very confused. “The war,” he said. “Vietnam. Have you ever heard of Vietnam?” “Vietnam, yes.” “I can’t move it,” he said, showing her his penis. “You see this?” he said, pointing at the yellow catheter tube. “It doesn’t move anymore and I have to use this tube. You see this tube,” he said, pointing to it again. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry about it, senorita is muy bonita ,” he said, staring at her dark eyes. “We can still love,” he said. The tears began to roll down her face. She was sitting in the bed next to him crying. “You see?” he said, pointing to the scar on his chest. “This is where they stuck a chest tube. . . .” She was getting up now and putting her clothes back on. She was still crying. She was so very beautiful and he wanted so much to lie with her body warm and soft against the top of him, where he could still feel. But now she was walking out the door, leaving for good. She didn’t even ask for his money, she didn’t even want that. He lay there for a long time until the madam came in and said it was time for him to leave. It was getting very late, she said. He put on his shirt and dragged his body across the bed, back into the wheelchair. The madam helped him out into the street. It was early in the morning and the sun was about to come up and he sat crying outside the whorehouse. A cab came by. The driver stopped and asked him if he needed anything. “Do you need a woman?” he said. “Hey, want to go to a great whorehouse? There’s a woman in there that will knock you out, really knows how to fuck.” There wasn’t anything left to lose, he thought. The driver got out of his cab and pushed him down the street to a place that was still open. “Wait a minute out here. I’ll be right back,” he told him. He came back with a big smile on his face. “Maria will be right out,” he said, and pushed him into the bar. A very young girl came into the room, walking past all the tables and then up to his. She had long brown hair down to her waist. “Do you want to sleep with me?” she said.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Ancient Romans, notorious for their sexual excess, were more likely to consider adultery a basically private matter to be resolved within the home rather than the courts. It was a personal rather than a criminal offense. During the reign of Augustus, however, new moral codes were implemented, including one that permitted the paterfamilias to put both adulterous parties to death. It is no coincidence that during this period, Virgil penned his Georgics, a paean to agriculture and farming life, reciting it to Augustus around 30 BC. Nor is it insignificant that the Roman way of life was often symbolized by a loaf of bread—wheat was a plough crop and a household staple. Against this backdrop and Augustus’s consolidation of power as he transitioned Rome from a republic to an empire with himself at the head, Augustus had his own daughter, Julia—vivacious, witty, and later the maternal grandmother of Caligula—exiled to a remote island of Campania for her many affairs, conducted openly while she was married to Tiberius. When asked why all her children resembled their father, she had famously quipped that she only took on new passengers when the boat was already loaded—that is, when she knew she was already pregnant by her husband. Noble though she may have been, in the reorganization of Rome under her father her own libido became a site of social control, and her deceptions and autonomy her undoing. Augustus called his intelligent daughter, beloved by the Romans for her generosity, “a disease in my flesh.” Later, when Tiberius succeeded Julia’s father as emperor, he withheld her allowance, and she died of malnutrition at age fifty-three in AD 14, the same year Augustus passed away, almost as if her fate, like Iphigenia’s, could not be unlinked from her father’s. In a context where female sexual autonomy was associated with lawlessness and potential chaos, even royal standing could not protect a woman from the consequences of alienating powerful men with her independent actions, now infidelities. Julia’s exile was presumably a powerful lesson for other women: do not, in the words of Natalie Angier, behave in ways that risk “the investment and tolerance of men and the greater male coalition.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e Roman lawyer Ulpian, in a legal defi nition of prostitution, claimed that sexual promiscuity was the decisive criterion of the prostitute, even more fundamental than venality. Th ere is no reason to believe that the author of this Life had read his Ulpian; rather, both are pushing the defi nition of prostitution by imagining the liminal case of a woman who did not accept payment. For Ulpian shame and prostitution merge at the horizon of his conservative worldview; for the Christian author, prostitution becomes, in the fi gure of Mary, pure sin. While Mary is living her debased life in Alexandria, she sees a crowd of Libyan and Egyptian men running toward the sea. Th ey are destined for Jerusalem, travelers to a holy feast. She has an urge to go with them but lacks money for the fare. Her motives are less than pure. “I wanted to go away with them in order to have a great many lovers, ready to serve my passions.” Mary throws down her distaff and approaches a group of youths who seem a likely mark for her ambitions. Waiting to board, she unlooses a torrent of shameless words that communicate her intentions. “Tongue cannot speak, ear cannot hear the things that happened on the journey, what acts I forced upon the wretched youths, against their will.” She stows on board, confi - dent of passage: “I have a body, and they will take that as my sailing fare.” What could be a clearer inversion of the romance? All the romances are tales of travel, of movement at sea; the heroine of the romance is moved by the force of necessity, taken captive by pirates against her will. Mary has set sail willingly, and corrupted herself with the crew out of her own lust. She has coerced men into sin. What the heroine of romance suff ered unwillingly as a test of her chastity, for Mary is an event that she engineered and during which her shamelessness reached new depths. Mary is the pirate. In Jerusalem Mary’s debauchery continues blazing its path. As the pilgrims gather for the feast, Mary hunts fresh prey. She brazenly goes to the Church of the True Cross, and even tries to enter, but she is repelled by R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D 

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  It is highly telling that the passages of the Divine Institutes devoted to libido are followed immediately by the presentation of Christian notions of penance. A rigorous sexual morality, if it is genuinely ambitious, will have mechanisms ready for the contingency of errant behavior. “Let no one desert or despair of himself if, overtaken by passion, driven by lust, deceived by error, or coerced by violence, he has fallen down the path of injustice.” Just a few years later, after the conversion of Constantine, Lactantius issued an abbreviated second edition of the Divine Institutes. Indulgence is given an even wider berth. “But in fact all of these things are difficult for man, nor in this state of frailty can any be without stain. Therefore the ultimate cure is that we may take refuge in penance.” The distance traveled from the time of Paul—who counseled in such searing, urgent words that sinners should be cast from the midst of the Christian assembly—is measured by the triumph of pragmatism over puritanism in the church’s management of sexual sin. The elaboration of a penitential discipline that could regulate the errors of the flesh is a sure sign of Christianity’s coming-of-age as a mass movement. The famous canons of Elvira, one of the earliest Christian synods, are almost precisely contemporary with the Divine Institutes. At this summit of Christian leaders in Spain, it was apparent that sexual discipline would be a leading preoccupation for a church quickly gathering size and strength. The canons of Elvira, like the pages of Lactantius, reflect the first stirrings of a great revolution in the boundaries of the church, in which it was transformed from a puritanical minority into an immense sexual sanatorium for all the world’s sinners.4

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  ais asks him where she is to discharge her bodily necessities, he answers, “Do what you must in the cell. You have luxuriated in sweet oils and perfumes, now let a fetid stench work its good on you.” She spent three years in darkness, as if in a tomb. Serapion went to Anthony— the father of Egyptian monasticism, who has been invited into this dark spiritual antiromance— to ask about the poor woman. Anthony’s disciple, Paul, dreams of a heavenly bed, attended by three virgins carry ing lamps, with a crown upon it. A voice tells him that the bed is for Th ais, the whore. Serapion goes to tell her that she is forgiven, and he fi nds her body so wasted away from penance that her skeleton is visible through her skin. Just days after coming out of her cell, Th ais dies. Th e story of Th ais is dominated by its heroine’s debasement. Th ough her life is said to have fulfi lled the dictum “Th e prostitutes and publicans will precede you into the kingdom of heaven,” the gospel expression retains  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N none of its original compassion for society’s outcasts. Th e Life of Th ais is valuable because it allows us to watch the translation of a primitive monastic tale into the symbolic world of classical fi ction. It already reveals the way that new confi gurations of religion, society, and the body fueled the literary imagination. Because the Life of Th ais is aesthetically clumsy, its author’s handiwork is nakedly obvious. Th e other three examples of the subgenre are more artful, and they reveal a deeper mastery of the medium and its potential. Among the earliest competitors to the Life of Th ais is the story of Pelagia, a prostitute and actress of Antioch. Th anks only to the brief aside in the sermon of Chrysostom do we know that there is a kernel of historicity in the story of a glamorous celebrity who converted to the ascetic life. We cannot say how far legendary material had accreted around her by the time the author of the life, sometime in the fi fth century, elaborated the written version that survives. We can only say that the author, who purports to be a deacon named Jacob, was a highly literate spirit, one of those soldiers of Christian culture who remade the ancient tradition in a Christian mold. Th e Life of Pelagia is highly conscious of its status as an antiromance. It counterposes its hero, an ascetic bishop named Nonnos, and its heroine, the redoubtable Pelagia, in the symmetrical fashion of the Greek novel. Th e story

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  After the death of Haninah comes his daughter’s escape from the brothel, and this episode is surely to be read in light of all that has preceded it in this intricate, contrapuntal structure. The arrangement suggests two insights. First, harlotry is a metaphor for idolatry. Second, in the parallel episode, the rabbis learn that the Torah will save them from iniquity. When Rabbi Meir comes to test the chastity of his sister-in-law, she tells him that the “manner of women is upon her.” Obviously this ruse compares to the epileptic fits or fictitious diseases of the other heroines—the “devices of virtue” that are the heroine’s only defense. But this device is something more specific, more resonant. The virgin tells her prospective customer that she is menstruating. She evades him, in other words, by trying to observe niddah, the ritual separation of a woman commanded by the Torah. Elsewhere in the Talmudim, women use this prohibition to their advantage, even postponing the mikveh to avoid sex. The daughter of Haninah here uses her claim to ritual impurity as her device of virtue. She obeys the Torah, and just as the Torah came to the rescue of the rabbis walking past the brothel, the Torah will watch over her, in the brothel. Rabbi Meir is convinced of her purity, and he effects her release. The Bavli this time does not proclaim openly that the Torah will protect its adherents—perhaps because its parchment has been symbolically burned—but it is efficacious nonetheless. This story ends with a twist. Rabbi Meir rescues his sister-in-law, and then the Romans begin to hunt for him. Walking down the street, he met Romans in hot pursuit. With nowhere else to escape, the Talmud reports, he darted into a nearby brothel, because no one would suspect Rabbi Meir of entering a brothel. Or, the Talmud relates, according to an alternative account, he saw pagans cooking food, dipped a finger in it, and pretended to eat. In this epilogue, a farrago of all that has preceded, it is the pretense of harlotry, both literal and metaphorical, that has secured his salvation from the Romans. It is possible to flirt with sin, or rather to be encompassed about by it, and yet to follow the Torah and enter the next life. That is the whole message of the tractate Avodah Zarah —how the faithful may endure in the midst of a hostile culture. The creative spirits who wove this tale from such varied threads refashioned the symbols of romance—the virgin’s body and the haunt of shame—into a statement about the boundaries between their community and the contaminations of the outside world. Structurally the Jewish virgin in the brothel is a direct parallel of the girls of early Christian fiction. But by the time the Talmud was redacted, Christian authors were embarking on even more daring reconfigurations of these ancient conventions.46

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Leucippe described the prostitute’s substitutional death in the language of animal sacrifi ce; it was a resonant statement in a culture that still very much believed in the mysterious powers of propitiation. While Leucippe’s eleutheria, her freedom and sexual respectability, kept her body inviolate through the most extreme tribulations, fate was not so kind to her opposite, the unfortunate prostitute.  Achilles Tatius has transformed mundane social prejudice into high art. Th at there were two fates for women was a fundamental and unchanging tenet of ancient sexual ideologies. Down one path lay promiscuity and  FROM SHAME TO SIN shame, personifi ed in the prostitute; down the other lay chastity and honor, personifi ed in the virgin and the matron. Th ese two fates were deeply em- bedded in patterns of social reproduction, loosely codifi ed in public law, and actively reinforced by the social technology of honor and shame. It is an achievement of Leucippe and Clitophon that the story has so openly con- templated the inscrutable economy of fortune, in the stunning contrast between its benefi ciary and its victim. Th e fate of the prostitute seems only more capricious and unjust in a novelistic universe where there is no re- demption beyond life, only the prospect of salvation through conjugal eros. In the cosmos created by the author, the prostitute’s grotesque demise serves only to exhibit the good fortune of Leucippe in even greater contrast. Th e norms attaching to male sexual behavior inevitably attract the lion’s share of the attention from historians. It is an obvious and insurmountable fact that our in for mants are almost exclusively male. More subtly, expecta- tions of female sexual behavior can seem uniform and immobile: good girls remain pure until marriage, faithful within marriage. Th e imposition of these limits is as unsurprising as the dawn. Th e eff ort to control female sexu- ality is precultural, a permanent fi xture of sexual competition. Th e regula- tion of female sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean shared all the predict- able features of a patriarchal culture. Nevertheless, the actual mechanics and specifi c infl ections of feminine sexual norms in the pre- Christian world merit closer inspection. Th e peculiar complexion of classical sexual culture derived from the institutionalization of a stark, binary opposition between women who possessed and women who lacked sexual honor.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Miller-Young is particularly interested in the adult entertainment actresses who perform in bondage and use racial stereotypes to market their bodies. Of sex educator/writer/performance artist Mollena Lee Williams-Haas, who starts her show in chains, unshackles herself, and then chooses to get into bindings again, Miller-Young observes the performance’s subtext “about slavery…it’s actually a continuing legacy that shapes our lives. It shapes our opportunities in a society and how we’re treated and how we see ourselves…and so she uses that representation to display that she now has power but that that power she has is connected to that history.” Miller-Young is fascinated by the way porn “takes up the challenge of subverting norms, even as it catalyzes and perpetuates them.” Black women who work in porn face a lot of misconceptions. Misunderstanding comes from two directions, Miller-Young explains. “One is from people of color…[who believe] you’re selling out—that you’re…signing on to exploitation and racism and making racism worse for everybody else…by participating in what they feel are stereotypical images or understandings, because largely people of color have been exoticized and hypersexualized and seen as having a deviant sexuality…The feeling of people of color in a lot of communities is that you’re…making the community look bad…you’re an embarrassment, and you’re…creating shame for the community—a really powerful shame.” At the same time, there are misperceptions “from white people who…predominantly have had this…knowledge passed on to them that people of color are hypersexual. And so they may think that they’re just naturally that way instead of performing a character…or performing in a film that has a script, that those…people of color sex workers really are just representations of how all black men have big dicks and…how women of color really are just more kinky and want sex more than everyone else.” Like the actresses in the films themselves, Miller-Young has been accused of making the community look bad. Or she has simply seen the value of her work questioned. During an interview with Miller-Young and sex researcher Dr. Herb Samuels on NPR, the host Farai Chideya acknowledged this dilemma, saying, “A lot of my relatives probably right now are saying, ‘Why is Farai even covering this?’” Overtly hostile critics have suggested that Miller-Young demeans herself and people of color with her work; still others have “said that by showing these images of porn stars, I [am] re-exploiting them. But I’m fascinated by the ‘ho,’” Miller-Young observes, refusing to back away from the powerful trope that causes discomfort, shame, excitement, and ire. “She is a figure that all black women have to contend with, whether you are sex workers or professors.” The real problem with the ho image for adult entertainment actresses, Miller-Young learned from talking to them, is that it devalues their labor. By deploying the ho, by not giving African American female actors the opportunity to play other roles, the porn industry maintains a segregated, niche market for black sexuality where actors are paid less, and kept there.